Update Sunday 10:15AM: IDR is now pegged at $41.6M for the weekend, not $45M as they were estimating yesterday. The $41.6M figure includes actuals for Friday and Saturday, plus estimates for Sunday. If the WOM continues to be terrible — it could get revised downward again tomorrow. This definitely sets it up for less than $20m in its second weekend.

It’s Saturday morning of Independence Day Resurgence’s opening weekend and it’s clear that IDR is performing far, far below initial expecations and significantly below the more recent downgraded expectations. It’s now looking like a $45M opening weekend with a disastrous Rotten Tomatoes critics score of 34% and an audience score of 42%. This means that whereas at one point it looked like Legend of Tarzan would be facing a robust IDR doing $50M++ on its second weekend — it now looks like it will be lucky to crack $20M on its second weekend — which is LOT’s first weekend.

But before we get too carried away with that, we have to also consider that Finding Dory is having a ridiculously strong second weekend at $75M and that means that FD on its third weekend will likely be in the $35-40M range, whereas previously it was reasonable to think it would be 20-25M by then. So while IDR will be 30m less on its second weekend than expected, FD will be 15-20M higher…..

That said, the IDR audience and the LOT audience are far more similar than the FD audience (or BFG for that matter) …. so the bottom line is that IDR tanking is good for LOT and creates some running room for Tarzan to get out there and grab some additional viewers.

How many?

Tracking still has LOT at around $30M for the 4 day weekend. That’s not good. It needs to reach at least $40M for the 3 day weekend — and $48-50M for the 4 day weekend to be regarded a success. Although keeping in mind that a lot of projections had it at $23-28M for the four day weekend, even a performance in the low thirties would beat expectations and help the narrative for the movie.

The other thing that is generally good for LOT is that Sony decided at the last minute to move The Shallows up by a week from July 1 to June 24 — and it has takena $16M bite out of this weekend’s box office, meaning it will take a much smaller bite next weeken. And The Shallows, which is all about Blake Lively getting into it with sharks, does pull from substantially the same demo as LOT and IDR.

So — how are we looking?

Figure IDR’s poor performance is at least a $3m boost for LOT. So let’s say LOT is at 30M, then it gets that $3m boost — what really needs to happen is for the promotion this last week to find another 5 m, and good WOM from Thursday night to Monday to generate another boost of 2-3M …..add all that up and it gets to 40M, exceeds expectations, and has “sleeper hit” potential.

I think that the performances of both The Shallows and IDR show that there’s still power in reviews and word of mouth, both positive and negative. So IDR not doing well does give LOT an opening, especially if LOT gets good reviews.

The Purge II: Anarchy opened with $29.8 million . The Purge III: Election year could well open better than either LOT or BFG. Advance sales of LOT don’t look good. I pre-ordered two for the 4:30 show on July 1 and so far only one other seat has been reserved.

It is entirely possible that The Purge is the top new pic next week.
But tracking has been squirrely for the last several months, so, once again, I think both LOT and BFG may do better than expected if they end up with good reviews and good word of mouth.

Hoping you’re right. John Carter opened at $30,180,188 en route to $73,078,100 domestic and $211,061,000 foreign …. so worldwide $284,139,100. Might as well keep those numbers in mind. I think you make a good point that with IDR tanking, the landscape is going to be Dory and BFG which are not date movies. There is Purge Election Year and the Shallows, though. . . . The big winner of the ‘IDR tanked” sweepstakes will probably either be LOT or Purge.

By the way, anyone else notice the “apes” in LOT are actually gorillas?
Tarzan was raised by great apes, the Mangani. Not Gorillas, the Bolgani. The apes in Dawn of Planet of the Apes are more like the creatures ERB had in mind. Wonder if Yates and company went with gorillas because “apes” had already been done and didn’t want to seem imitative?

There are some photos online, they actually seem to look rather chimplike while the apes in the movie look more like gorillas, but perhaps the movie makers were thinking of them, who knows. Nice idea anyway, I think.

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